About

The Boston College Irish Newspaper project comes out of Boston College Libraries' efforts to make information about its own newspaper holdings more available.  Back in Fall 2021, the Burns Library Public Services staff told the Irish Studies Librarian about difficulties they were facing pointing researchers to newspaper titles by date. To fix the issue, we decided to see if we could create a data sheet with the titles and dates of our microfilm coverage. To our great luck, we already had a phenomenal graduate student working with Burns who was willing to begin tackeling the research into the individual titles.

Our Irish Studies Librarian reached out to our Data Services group to discuss possibilities for making the information available. The Irish Studies Librarian felt that just making the list of titles and dates available would be useful, but noted that if we could make it searchable that would be incredible. One of our data services librarian suggested that we create an interface in Tableau. 

A platform, however, raised further questions of how we wanted to display the data. In conversation, one of the data points we thought would be most useful was political affiliation. That information was not, however, included in our records almost at all. Fortunately - that same graduate student was willing to tackel the issue.

The current presentation is an initial sample of the first two sets of Irish Newspaper microfilm we house in Boston College's O'Neill Library. We are currently working on the much longer and involved 20th century rolls. 

Please contact our Irish Studies Librarian with questions.